Pastoralism in the Andes

• Main Author: Dransart, Penelope
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2018
• Subjects: Arctic; Argentina
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199766581-0200

The topic considered in this bibliography has emerged fairly recently. Pastoralism is a subsistence economy in which people keep large herds of animals, and it is based on the extensive use of pasture grounds. Instead of growing fodder to feed their herds, pastoralists usually take them to different pastures to which they have access. Seasonal mobility is a fundamental aspect of most pastoralist societies. For much of the 20th century, some authors dogmatically proclaimed that pastoralism existed in Eurasia, in various parts of the African continent, and in the sub-Arctic, but not in the Americas. They argued that the introduction of sheep to the Navajo in North America enabled some native people to become pastoralists. In 1908 Éric Boman mentioned herding communities at high altitude in Argentina and, in 1946 Bernard Mishkin remarked on herding communities in Peru, but these notices went unheeded (see Webster 1973, cited under Defining Pastoralism as a Way of Life in the Andes). These mentions acquired significance in the 1960s, when Jorge Flores Ochoa (originally publishing in Spanish) and Horst Nachtigall (originally publishing in German) challenged the view that pastoralism was absent in the Andes. In a series of influential articles, the historian John V. Murra argued that independent pastoralist communities did not exist in the pre-Hispanic past because such communities would have formed part of a greater agrarian economy. Yet the emerging ethnographic evidence suggested there were people who had been specialist herders for considerable periods of time. Researchers therefore started to question how pastoralism arose. Did it have ancient, pre-Hispanic roots, or was the phenomenon recent, postdating the 16th-century arrival of Europeans? In the 1960s, authors did not have access to the findings more recently reported by archaeologists and archaeozoologists. The theme of “production pastorale et société” drew scholars together in France to tackle social aspects of pastoralist production, and some of them turned their attention toward the Andes. By 1969 French researchers had begun to collaborate on interdisciplinary field projects undertaken with counterparts from the United States, focusing on the Ayacucho basin and the Puna de Junín in Peru. From the 1970s onward, the study of pastoralism in the Andes rapidly acquired the multi- and interdisciplinary characteristics on which the selection of publications chosen for this bibliography is based. There is still a shortage of general overviews on pastoralism in the Andes; many of the publications included here restrict their coverage to a particular region and/or to specific aspects of pastoralism. The sections are therefore organized on a thematic basis. These themes intersect, however, and are not mutually exclusive.